Читать книгу NEXT STOP: UNSTOPPABLE - Malte Stöckert - Страница 8

You Can Only Build an Organization if the Customer Actually Wants Your Product

It’s not worth building an organization until you know exactly what the customer wants.

To offer a complex, great product or service to the customer, there needs to be a great organization backing it up. The better the people in the organization understand what the customer really feels and thinks, the better they can anticipate what the customer actually wants, i.e., the better they can translate what the customer wants into a valuable service or a great product.

If you look at organizations today you might see how, for many people, there’s no interest whatsoever in what the customer really wants. Take retail, for example. They’re undergoing a steadily deteriorating sales environment because most consumers order their things from specific suppliers on the Internet and have them delivered directly to their homes. Large department stores, which were a must-have in every major German city in the 1980s, are more and more disappearing from city centers today. And that’s not just because of consumer convenience; it’s also because of the neutral, unfriendly treatment that customers experience in-store. Employees or employers don’t want to adapt to the new situation and change for the better, apparently.

So, as a store owner or employee wanting to retain customers, I need to think carefully: what does the customer actually want to experience in my store? There are many examples where this is achieved through a special approach to the customer, a unique product range, or through a particularly well-designed atmosphere.

Again, what does the customer want to experience when he’s choosing to buy something in-store instead of online? When looking into how manufacturing companies are organized, you notice that very few of them consider what experience the customer wants to have with the manufactured product. This applies to all price ranges, especially the higher ones, where even more effort should be put in.

It may be that a company has very good marketing and a market research department that specializes in generating new product ideas. But already at the next stage with the product developer, the interest seems to fizzle out. Add the purchasing department into the mix, which, having less interest in the quality of components, is often cost-driven and prefers buying from low-wage countries, and the idea of wanting to create a great product for the customer starts to dwindle.

In this kind of environment, production and quality managers must be proactive with, represent, and enforce their own interests. A conflict of goals is inevitable. The quality manager must constantly wrestle with the fact that other departments are trying to deliver the quality that was promised but not delivered. Special approvals and concessions are permanently created to justify the ever-decreasing product quality. Oddly enough, companies where quality is “practiced” in this way often have something to say about high quality in their corporate values. In these companies, adherence to quality is the supreme law.

But what does all this have to do with the customer’s wishes, which in the best-case scenario should be anticipated so that the product or service can succeed in being particularly valuable? Almost nothing. In fact, there’s a complete disconnect between the customer’s request and the actions taken.

Yet the more you’re able to incorporate the customer’s wants and needs into the daily operations of the organization, the better the fulfillment of the service or product will be. The organization that is inspired by meeting customers’ needs and anticipates what else they’d want will always have an advantage over organizations where people don’t care about them.

In well-run hotels, the bartender will consciously take time to start a conversation with each guest so they feel attended to and appreciated. Good hotels pay special attention to this customer experience.

A very simple question I always ask is: “What would you expect from us if you were our customer?” This works in many situations because it suddenly becomes clear what needs to be done. Other, less pressing concerns suddenly move into the background.

But today, the interests of shareholders or top management are often put BEFORE the interests of the customers. You can see the impact of this trade-off in middle management discussions – their disputes about whether a product should be delivered with a defect so that the monthly quota is met, for example. Is this really being done in the interest of the customer?

If the company’s management doesn’t keep the customer’s wishes in mind, then selfish needs and interests take their place, and consideration for what the customer actually wants falls by the wayside. In that kind of environment, it’s all about tangible and egocentric, selfish goals. It’s about advancing your career and salary. The lower-level manager now finds himself in a conflict of objectives: should he fulfill the needs of his superior, the customer’s wishes, or act according to the values set by the company’s leadership? Most try to juggle everything, striving to meet every requirement. In the end, what’s important and for what purpose the work is being done become completely unclear.

The manager, with all these various goals weighing him down, loses motivation to work because he simply doesn’t know what should be done anymore. So, he reduces his commitment in the medium term because he realizes that, otherwise, he’ll be worn out trying to meet all the various demands..